Assessing the Role Palestinians Have Played in the Failed Bid for Statehood

It’s difficult to overestimate the virtues of secular history, especially in such a God-smacked region as the Middle East.

You could argue that the peoples of the region would benefit from a little less attention and devotion; their struggles become both magnified and abstracted by exiles and co-religionists whose own passions sometimes seem to have little relationship to life on the ground.

Rashid Khalidi, American-born, comes from one of Jerusalem’s most distinguished families, which has also provided another distinguished historian, Walid Khalidi. Together they have done much to provide a Palestinian narrative rooted in their personal histories but disciplined by the standards of Western scholarship.

Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, “The Iron Cage,” is at heart a historical essay, an effort to decide why the Palestinians, unlike so many other peoples and tribes, have failed to achieve an independent state. To Mr. Khalidi’s credit, the answers are not very comforting to Palestinians, whose leaders have often made the wrong choices and have not yet built the institutional structures for statehood.

At the heart of the book is his anguished question about what the Palestinians call al nakba, the catastrophe — “why Palestinian society crumbled so rapidly in 1948, why there was not more concerted resistance to the process of dispossession, and why 750,000 people fled their homes in a few months.”

Mr. Khalidi has his own set of external culprits: British colonial masters like Lord Balfour, who refused to recognize the national rights of non-Jews; lavish financial support for Jewish immigration; the romanticism and cynicism of Arab leaders, themselves newly hatched from the colonial incubator.

Like Britain before it, he argues, the United States “consistently privileged the interests of the country’s Jewish population over those of its Arab residents,” helping Israel to push “Palestinians into an impossible corner, into an iron cage” from which, he suggests, a viable Palestinian state may not, in the end, emerge.

But he has plenty of blame for the Palestinians, too — for the rivalries among rich Palestinian families who competed to serve their colonial masters, for leaders who failed to see the impact of Hitler on Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine, for those who mismanaged the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt against the British and especially for Yasir Arafat, who, along with his colleagues in Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, has a special place in Mr. Khalidi’s pantheon of Palestinian failure.

While his book is more of an analysis than an exercise in original research, Mr. Khalidi provides another service for Western readers. He gives a relatively dispassionate description of Palestine in the periods of Ottoman and British rule, and of the nature of Arab society before the combination of Zionism and Nazism led an increasing flow of European-born Jews to settle in the Holy Land.

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Rashid Khalidi, author of the book "The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood."Credit
University of Chicago

Whatever the justice of history — if the notion of justice can be applied to history at all — it is useful for Americans to understand that at the beginning of the 1930’s, Jews made up only 17.8 percent of the population of British Palestine, and annual Jewish immigration was declining to only a few thousand a year.

But by the end of the 1930’s, Mr. Khalidi writes, “after the rise to power of Hitler spurred the annual arrival of many tens of thousands of refugees,” the Jewish population rose to more than 30 percent. In 1935 more than 60,000 Jews went to Palestine, which equaled the entire Jewish population in 1919.

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Jews did not begin the fighting, but from March to October 1948, slightly more than half the Arab population — 750,000 people, Mr. Khalidi estimates (and his footnote on the topic is well worth reading) — fled, were forced to flee or were expelled from areas that became part of the new state of Israel.

Like a new generation of Israeli historians, Mr. Khalidi makes the point that a Jewish homeland in Palestine meant that many of the pre-existing Arab majority, who owned most of the private land, had to be removed or “transferred,” a dilemma much discussed among mainstream Zionist leaders.

After the fighting halted in 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of mandatory Palestine, compared with the 55 percent allotted under the United Nations partition plan.

These uncomfortable facts, long before Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, help to explain the anger, bluster and shame that have fueled so much of Palestinian politics.

This is not to say that Mr. Khalidi, currently director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies, is without passion. His book is bound to stir angry responses from those who think that any Palestinian effort to fight the soldiers of the Israeli occupation represents terrorism, or from those, Muslim or Jew, who think that their divinity gave all of Palestine exclusively to them.

In a long introductory essay, “Writing Middle Eastern History in a Time of Historical Amnesia,” he insists that at almost every stage, Palestinians “were the weakest of all the parties engaged in the prolonged struggle to determine the fate of Palestine” and “remain considerably less powerful by any measure than the forces that stand in the way of their achieving independent statehood.”

He is overly defensive about choosing to analyze Palestinian failures, but his book represents a brave response to Palestinians who see themselves only as victims.

While he is quite critical of the long Israeli occupation, supported by successive American governments, that has stunted Palestinian choices, Mr. Khalidi respects what the Israelis have built on the ashes of the Holocaust. Though he doesn’t quite put it this way, he would like his own people to emulate a little more and complain a little less.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page B18 of the New York edition with the headline: Assessing the Role Palestinians Have Played in the Failed Bid for Statehood. Today's Paper|Subscribe